Rocking the rating system?

Deloitte sponsors competition aimed at producing new chess rating system
30/03/2011

Deloitte’s $10,000 competition prize will be awarded to the team that submits the most accurate predictions and the winning team will travel to Athens to present their findings to the World Chess Federation (FIDE).

Deloitte sponsors competition aimed at producing new chess rating system

Deloitte Australia is sponsoring an international competition aimed at using data analytics to find the most accurate rating system to predict chess outcomes. The competition is managed by Kaggle, a global leader in crowd sourced data modelling and home of statistics and predictive modelling competitions for companies and governments.

Anthony Goldbloom, Kaggle CEO, commented: “The Elo rating system has been applied to everything from chess to computer games and world soccer ranking. This competition could change all that.”

Anthony Viel, Deloitte Analytics national partner, sees the Deloitte sponsorship as an exciting opportunity to develop the ancient game of chess, whilst enabling greater accuracy in forecasting chess rating systems using crowd-source data mining.

“The Kaggle relationship is a great fit for Deloitte as the sponsorship reflects our strategy that highlights the insight that analytics and data can provide to clients,” he said. “For our clients we typically solve business problems that are in fact quite similar to the more academic challenge reflected in this chess rating competition; learning from the past to pick winners in the future: a challenge common to many areas of business ranging from mergers and acquisitions, evaluating default risk for a group of debtors, optimising portfolios of bonds, stocks and options or deciding where to place a store, outlet or depot.”

Deloitte’s $10,000 competition prize will be awarded to the team that submits the most accurate predictions and the winning team will travel to Athens to present their findings to FIDE and may just be immortalised in chess history with the revised rating system being named after them. The two mental disciplines of chess and data mining are attracting some serious competition – the front runners are currently the duo who won the Netflix data mining prize.

Obviously Deloitte recruiters around the world are keeping a keen eye on team scores on the leader board.

Kaggle Chairman Nicholas Gruen, formerly chair of the Australian Federal Government’s Government 2.0 Taskforce said, “Deloitte Analytics in Australia has a great reputation both within Deloitte globally and more widely as a practice that really ‘gets’ big data,” Gruen said.

Contest participants will train their rating systems using a training dataset of over 1.84 million game results for more than 54,000 chess players across as recent eleven year period. Participants then use their method to predict the outcome of a further 100,000 games played among those same players during the following three months. Contest entries will be scored automatically by the website, based on the accuracy of their predictions. Two entries per day can be submitted by each team and prizes will be determined according to each team’s best-scoring single submission.

The competition ends 3:00 p.m. Wednesday, 4 May 2011.

Source: http://www.consultant-news.com